Business service management (BSM) is a suite of products for monitoring and measuring information technology services from a business perspective. BSM gives users the ability to collect data (both performance metrics and events) from a wide range of data collectors associated with an Information Technology infrastructure. These data collectors range from collectors that monitor low level hardware performance such as processor usage to higher level collectors that can monitor business transactions that span multiple machines and processes such as order fulfillment. BSM contains a wide variety of ways to analyze and manage the data obtained from monitoring. In addition, implementations of the BSM may contain many applications that range from a dashboard that displays the real-time status of various business processes to an application allowing users to create Service Level Agreements on their business applications or hardware performance.
Implementations of BSM aim to meet the needs of a diverse customer audience. Not all customers want to run the same data collectors or use the same set of applications to analyze and report on their data. In addition, capacity levels can vary as well. For example, one customer may need to monitor the performance of 100 servers and have 10 concurrent users on a BSM system, while another will monitor 10,000 hosts and have 75 concurrent users on the BSM system.